What is Employee Engagement, Really? And How does it Contribute to the Employee Experience?
Employee engagement is the measure of how far an organization can go with the talent they have. For peak performance, culture and engagement go hand-in-hand. Culture is the difference between an ordinary group of people and a unified organization. Culture and Engagement are two parts of a transformational whole.
A simplified way to look at it is culture is “the who” and engagement is “the what.”
Culture defines:
- Company strengths
- Company weaknesses
- Company blind spots
- Company personality
- Company authenticity
Whereas engagement, measures:
- Job satisfaction
- Employee commitment
- Discretionary effort
- Psychological ownership
- Leadership effectiveness
When an organization conducts an employee survey to gain line of sight into the level of current employee engagement, the result is a mountain of data. And somewhere in that data are a few transformational facts and ideas that warrant attention. Not all data are equal or useful.
Understand the connections—what matters most in contributing to the conscientiousness, motivation, and commitment of your people. What engages them and how does that impact the bottom line through the employee experience? By validating this connection, managers, leaders, and executives can know exactly what to focus on to drive business and workforce results.
Employee engagement is not about satisfaction or making employees happy at work. It’s not even about having a great place to work.
Employee engagement is about those factors that cause your employees to want to work harder, stay longer, and care more.
Engagement is about factors such as pride, commitment, motivation, and loyalty—it’s the willingness to advocate for the organization, a sense of personal responsibility, and a goal of developing the most effective and productive work environment.
Engagement varies dramatically from company to company, and even from year to year within a company. It can be greatly influenced if done correctly.
Learn how the changing environment of 2020 impacted the workforce.
